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Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Mrs. Claus Explains It All by Claus and Wenzel - Review and link to e-book promotion

Sourcebooks sent out some promotional material about this gorgeous picture e-book, this morning, and I asked to review it before passing on any links. Mrs. Claus Explains It All by Elspeth Claus is an enhanced e-book that gives children the option of choosing to have Mrs. Claus read to them. A little note on each page shows a child's question ("How old are you and Santa?", "What are Santa's workshops like?"), each of which is read by a child's voice, and Mrs. Claus' cheerfully replies. The answers are shown in text that's placed so that the illustrations are large and clear.

It's really the illustrations that make Mrs. Claus Explains it All enjoyable, in my humble opinion, although there is nothing better than a book that reads itself when you hit the road with small children. We used to carry loads of books on tape for the kids, when we traveled. I found the text a little flat and dull when just reading it without Mrs. Claus narrating, but the narration gives it a special spark and the illustrations are beautiful. I can easily imagine a small child paging through the e-book over and over, again. Of course, on an iPad you can zoom in to admire the details of the illustrations. I love beautiful artwork, so I found myself zooming in, quite a bit.

Definitely recommended, especially if you're looking for a holiday book with narration to help keep your child occupied while traveling or when the adults are busy fussing around in the kitchen during the holidays. There's a link to sample pages, below, so you can peek inside and listen to the voices to see if you like the book, before purchasing.

2 comments:

This is such a great idea for those kids who are small and can't read everything on their own, and I would rather recommend an interactive book than a video game any day! Great post today. I need to see about grabbing a copy of this one!

Our eldest loved books that came with a tape and would spend hours listening to the tapes while reading along in the books, even after he learned to read. So cool that you can now have the whole book and audio together in such a nice compact unit, don't you think? Yes, so much better than video games!

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Bookfool periodically whispers unusual words and disappears in a puff of smoke. New review policy can be seen below by clicking on the Eat, Sleep, Read image. All material (including photos, but excluding most cover images) is my own unless otherwise stated and thus protected by copyright. Please leave a comment on any post to request permission to use content from this blog.